During a career that spanned nearly fifty years from 1889, Marie Belloc Lowndes published journalism, biography, a guidebook, history for children, novels (mostly romances or thrillers), a book about actual crimes, and four late volumes of autobiography. Her books of crime and detection were her most successful. Her list of titles numbers more than seventy.
Milestones
5 August 1868 MBL, the elder of two children, was born at
11 George Street,
Marylebone, in lodgings, since her
mother had returned from France for the birth but her
grandmother did not want it to take place in her house.
1913 MBL scored a slowly registering hit with
The Lodger, coolly received at first but later the best-known of her novels, which is set in 1880s
London and relates a mystery not unlike that of the notorious Jack the Ripper.
1956 MBL's book about her
brother's early years,
The Young Hilaire Belloc, appeared posthumously in the
USA (edited by her daughter
Elizabeth Iddesleigh). It was never published in England.
